TUNNELLING ON THE WEST FRONT.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15133, 30 January 1917, Page 5

TUNNELLING ON THE WEST FRONT.

BY DRAIN DRAGOON. Of all the jobs I’ve had that of a Drain Dragoon is the best. It beats-a staff job hollow, as the Drain Dragoon is king of the castle, so to speak, and is listened to and sought for when the staff have ttie “Wind up.” ' xn fact, although we hold an inferior rank, the very fact of being engaged jn the bowels of the earth, as the Press says we are, puts us on a high pedestal.

uast night I turned in early as the listening reports of the previous week had made me anxious. The most interesting report came from J Sector; Boches working, hard, 250 degrees 10 min, chalk falling, walking, hammering, and sounds of trucking my district with the naked ear. Ye Gods! T wake up in the middle of the night and could swear i heard these sounds myself, the unconscious nerve strain of seven months active service had go me down. But u. was only a dream, and I turned over in my beautiful bed, determined to go up early in the morning to hear the sounds myself. At four a.m. a special report came in marked “Urgent.” It read—The Hun is very active in J Sector sounds of boring distinct to the naked ear, and sounds like a horse eating chaff. I said to myself; the Hun can’t surely have horses working down so far underground; it must he a boring machine. So I thought it’s no use', the only thing to do is to go and hear the horses, so I get out of bed and wondered if the Hun would have broken through and pinched our gallery. The idea of a fight underground with picks and shovels went ‘through my head as I sent a special message to the officer in charge of the gallery to keep listening continually ti}l I arrived, and told him to make all necessary arrangements for loading up. I went after breakfast towards, the galleries, nearly got caught by a piece of antiaircraft stuff, which our guns were , working at a' Hun aeroplane 12,000 ft above me, so I took shelter in a house, or, rather - , what remained of it, and eventually pushed on to the foot of the connection, trench. Here I met one of pur own Dragoons—a faithful one at that—and he said, “I’m just going down to a battery position to listen under the battery officers’ dugout, as he says the Hun is under his guns.” “What? Who said so?” I interjected, and he said, “OK, the forward observing officer.” Ye Gods! the Hun is everywhere, I thought, and we have never heard him anywhere except under the galleries we took over from the French. So off my faithful Dragoon went and came back to our. dugout in the lino and reported he had cleared up the situation, and found it was the sentry over the guns stamping on the duck hoards of his look-out to keep himself warm. It’s the same old story why people he» rthings everywhere. There isn’t a dugout on the front we liavri’t listened in, and the reports are always nil. “Except on one occasion” brings forth the whisky bottle, so we always attend to strange sounds, and if we can’t get them reported we can always send a man to do. a little picking about 2 a.m. close to a dugout where a good brand is Kept. The Drain Dragoon is so obliging, and if stronger than tea is produced,, one can always insist that the dugout under which the wily Hun is supposed to he is really mined. A luirried departure by the occupants will - leave -foe Drain Dragoon and his satellites in charge to investigate the spirits and other noises. Well, I toddled on and dodged a big sausage on the way to the gallery where the strange sounds had been heprd. At the wind chamber I met the listener, and ue said the Hun had stopped work. I entered the gallery with candle in hand and felt my heart doing good time, so I stopped to pluck up courage, and I thought I heard the horse. Could i- be the spirits of the two men we lost the previous month, and whose bodies lie far below the surface crushed to a pulp. No, rot; it’s the effect of reading Sir Oliver Lodge’s hook, "Raymond; or, Life and Death.”

i made my way cat-like along the gallery, and‘distinctly heard the sounds of rustling, and, thinking the Hun had broken in, I blew out the candle and. backed out like a cart horse out of a stable, when suddenly six huge rats, as big as cats, rushed past me, and my heart jumped into my mouth. The horse vision came back to me, and feeling fed-up, I''stole out of the gallery brave as a lion, and pooh-poohed the idea of a Hun being within 1000 inches ot it.